But baby, there's a lion over there

As any dating woman knows, men can be dogs — but a new study suggests antelopes might be a better fit.

Male topi antelopes will resort to deception to keep a potential mate around, snorting as if there’s a lion nearby just when it seems she might wander off. The discovery is the first report of outright mate deception in an animal other than Homo sapiens, a research team reports in the July American Naturalist.
Study leader Jakob Bro-Jørgensen discovered the devious behavior while studying topi antelopes on the savannas of the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where during the spring mating season males stake out territories rich in grass. The female antelopes are sexually receptive for one day only, and they spend that day visiting several males, munching grass and mating.

Bro-Jørgensen noticed that when a female would start to wander away from a male’s territory, the male would look in the direction she was headed, prick his ears and snort loudly — the same snort the animals use when they’ve noticed a lion, leopard or other approaching predator.

“It was quite funny — it made me laugh,” says Bro-Jørgensen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool in England. “It’s such an obvious lie — clearly there’s no lion.”

Suitors in nature commonly exaggerate their virtues. But this work documents a rare situation in which evolution favors outright lying in the mating game, says Reeve. The cost of the lie is minimal to the male antelope — he merely snorts. But the cost to the female of ignoring the lie could be great — if there truly is a predator nearby, she’s dead.
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